Reading Time: 5 minutes After living in the city since the 80s, Plumb’s new book gathers snapshots of walks around the neighbourhood as she grappled with the unsettling disillusionment and shortcomings of the social landscape
Reading Time: 3 minutes Massao Mascaro’s Sub Sole is ambitious in its far-reaching subject matter, weaving together narratives around “European culture, mythologies, southern Europe, and migration”
Reading Time: 3 minutes “The edit is urgent, almost apocalyptic.”
Reading Time: 3 minutes Driven by a desire to “do everything differently”, in 2017 Davis dropped his ongoing projects and spent two years travelling to Los Angeles, resulting in an expansive monograph published by Aperture
Reading Time: 8 minutes Writer and associate director at Pier 24, Allie Haeusslein guides us through the artistic highlights of the shape-shifting city
Reading Time: 6 minutes Pairing extracts of pages from her personal diaries with portraits of young women in their teens, the American photographer paints a candid picture around the complexity of growing up.
Reading Time: 7 minutes An Arctic town plunged into darkness for two months of the year, and known as “ground zero for climate change”, provided Mark Mahaney with the impetus for his first personal project.
Reading Time: 10 minutes Visiting seven sites of mass shootings, Andres Gonzalez considers the ways that communities grieve and recover from events that shatter their lives
Reading Time: 9 minutes He spent 40 years documenting the street life and subcultures
of the Bay Area, but
kept his work hidden. Discovered by SFMoMA in 2001, Michael Jang’s vast archive now forms
a new book and his first major retrospective, giving a rare insight into his wayward career
Reading Time: 9 minutes Arresting. Exquisite. Gripping. Chilling. Disgraceful. Unacceptable. These are all words people have used to describe portraits made by Jono Rotman. Created over the last decade, his project Mongrelism presents an intimate look at members of the Mongrel Mob – New Zealand’s largest, most notorious gang. Though he is looking at a subculture as an outsider – a domain regularly mined by photojournalists – Rotman eschews a traditional documentarian approach to his subject matter. In so doing, the project’s scope extends beyond the Mob itself to touch upon issues related to New Zealand’s charged colonial past and self-professed biculturalism, the politics and ethics of portraiture, and the intersections of seemingly disparate human experience.
The New Zealand-born photographer explains that since childhood, “I always felt certain violent and uneasy forces within my country”. In Lockups (1999-2005), Rotman photographed the interiors of prisons and psychiatric hospitals throughout New Zealand, exploring the medium’s ability to convey the fraught “psychic climate” embedded in these state-controlled institutions. The works are eerily devoid of people, a deliberate decision made, says Rotman, “because I wanted to encourage a direct, personal interaction with the spaces. With prisons, for example, as soon as you introduce people into the picture, it becomes easy to think, ‘Here’s the storyline: this place is for those sorts of people. And I can fit it all into my established worldview’.”